


of younger sisters and disillusionment

by chromatic



Category: Carole & Tuesday (Anime)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 20:57:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18786079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chromatic/pseuds/chromatic
Summary: He finds her at a music venue. He doesn’t enter—he doesn't have to—to know that it’s her.





	of younger sisters and disillusionment

**Author's Note:**

> The song from the EP 5 was my favorite so far :) Anyways here's a mindless character study I came up with, I'm not that happy with it but hey (honestly, I didn't even remember Tuesday's brother's name and I had to look on the wikia LOL). Sorry for any glaring inconsistencies w/ the show.

Their mother insists. Tuesday doesn't like the lessons, but Valerie reminds her not-so-kindly that she’s got to prepare for running the family business one day. It will be her and Spencer, Valerie says, turning their trillion dollar corporation into one that reaps at least twice the profits. She wouldn’t expect anything less.

Tuesday, predictably, doesn’t like being confined to the classrooms. She is seven and the world is still too big to be crammed into two-dimensional charts of revenues and sales. She cries, one day, when Mr. Chadney gives her a particularly gruesome lecture on what will happen to her if she slacks off.

On the way out, Spencer says, “Want to get ice cream?"

He says, "Tell you what. We’ll go shopping. It will be fun. Besides,” he tells her, lowering his voice to be conspiratorial. “I have mom’s credit card with me.”

* * *

The guitar costs two hundred dollars, but he figures Valerie won't even notice it. After all, it barely makes a dent in her paycheck. Valerie makes fifty-thousand dollars an hour. What matters is that somewhere in between Tuesday stops crying, the guitar in her arms, cradled. It’s too big for her, but she refuses to let him carry it home, and she's so sure about it that he lets her go, the first to a series of letting go, and—

* * *

“You don’t understand,” Tuesday is saying. Spencer, halfway up the stairs, catches a glimpse of her cotton dress, oddly bright in the half-lit room. “I can’t give this up. I can’t—can't chase after anything else, I—”

“You are being foolish,” Valerie says. Valerie has never been one for sympathy. She looks down now, hawk-eyed, at her daughter, her mouth twisted into something of a sneer. “Don’t waste your life on such stupid little fantasies. You will end up with nothing, you know."

“I have to try,” Tuesday says, her voice wavering in its sincerity, and Spencer—

Spencer thinks back to a simpler time, when he was fourteen and his mother found one of the sketchbooks he kept in his drawer with his clothes. She made him sit and watch, then, as she smeared the pencil under her finger, tore the sheets off one by one, used them to feed the fire. Under her hand the lines had distorted, blurring, as Spencer had tried not to flinch. Here’s the thing: Spencer used to think life was beautiful before Valerie told him to stop looking.

And he’d learned, as she intended, to turn his head, to stop staring at birds cresting across the sky or fish darting through the pond in the backyard or roses unfurling in their front lawn, trimmed and pristine. Of course, just because he cut something out of his life does not mean it was cut out cleanly. Sometimes in his study sessions when he’s taking notes he still itches to draw. Sometimes he wakes up and misses art like a phantom limb, but then he thinks—

There is someone he has to be. There is someone his mother needs him to be, and that person is not an artist.

“I think,” he tells Tuesday afterwards, “you should just give it up.”

Tuesday bites her lip, rocks back on her heels. “Oh, so you’re agreeing with mom, then,” she says.

“No,” he says, because that’s not it. "I-"

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” she cuts him off. “There’s a lot more to life than mother’s company.”

“You think I don't understand?" he retorts, on impulse, something wound tight in his chest. "You think I never wanted something as much as you did?”

“You can’t have."

He thinks of her guitar, too large in her arms as she walked home with it. It fits her, now. She’s grown, without him even realizing it.

“You can’t have ever wanted something like _this_ ," she says, "or else you wouldn’t have been able to give it up.”

* * *

Aside from the suitcase, Tuesday leaves everything behind. Spencer doesn’t worry. He swallows down any semblance of worry. She isn't his to look after anymore, and she'll be back soon, if her lack of foresight is anything telling. He heads off to his bedroom, snaps open his laptop, and starts typing up a weekly report on the company’s standings.

It only occurs to him, later, with a jolt, that maybe she was leaving everything behind not in a show off carelessness, but rather, finality. It takes him another few days to realize she's really not coming back.

* * *

When they are little and at their uncle’s house their uncle finds it funny to give them both bikes. The bikes are both a little too big, and neither Tuesday nor Spencer knows how to ride them. Spencer remembers falling, scraping his knee, registering the sting of it and thinking, what’s the point. He heads in for dinner, eventually.

He remembers patching Tuesday up after a bad fall, peeling back the strips around the band aid with one hand, the other trained steady on her arm. “Maybe we should head in,” he says. "Dinner's ready."

“Not until I get this right,” she says, and he's tempted to roll his eyes. He thinks, what a steep price to pay to learn to ride a bike you can’t even keep.

But she learns. She learns, and he catches her coursing down a street a week later, blond hair floating behind her as she turns a corner, neatly, at the edge of the sidewalk, and he—

* * *

“Tuesday posted a picture on instagram,” Spencer comments, halfway through a meal.

Valerie raises an eyebrow. “Can you track her with it? Text me the location.”

“I’ll go after her myself,” he volunteers, already standing up from his seat. She stares him down, and he tries to school his expression into something neutral. “It will save you time,” he says, though it’s unnecessary. She’s too public of a figure to go looking in the city, anyways. If word gets out about Valerie’s only daughter running off, there will be trouble.

“Take your phone with you,” she tells him, sternly, and his shoulders loosen by a fraction. He musters a tired smile.

“Thanks. I will.”

* * *

He wonders, at times, if he had stayed out with her, fallen more, crashed the bike into the wall as she had, would he have learned, eventually, how to bike like her? Would he have been able to keep up with her—Tuesday, her hair like streamers in the wind, cresting down the street, hands tight on the handlebars—as she turned, sharply and suddenly, out of his vision?

* * *

He finds her at a music venue.

He doesn’t enter—he doesn't have to—to know that it’s her. Valerie never liked when she sung, but Valerie was so often away. He’d always pretended not to hear. He’d turn a blind eye to Tuesday and her guitar and his sketchbooks and the ache in his chest like a vice, the selfish prospect of being someone more, but—

Tuesday sings, now, softly at first, and then louder. Spencer stops. Spencer stands perfectly still. He’s spent his childhood looking away from everything beautiful for so long he's become numb to it, for years, with no sketchbook to memorialize things in. But if anything in the world is beautiful it must be this, in all its reckless spontaneity—Tuesday, singing to the rasp of her guitar, singing to someone else.

He starts typing in his mother’s number, on autopilot, and then stops.

“Someday I’ll find my way home," she's saying. He thinks, strangely, that maybe this is closer to home for her than anything he's ever had to offer, shored up and locked away in their monster of a house. Maybe his world was too small for them both, but she's made it out.

He shuts his phone off.

* * *

“Mom,” he argues. Tuesday is performing on a national stage now, and Valerie isn't letting it off. “You could lose her, you know, if you don’t let her come home.”

“This—this music business is bullshit," Valerie is saying. "I hate it. It isn’t sustainable.”

“She’s making it big, mom, look,” he says, and turns his phone to her. “The stadium has sixty-thousand seats and they’re all sold out. See, she’s a hit."

“It's shameful. I didn’t raise her to do something like this,” Valerie says.

“But she found her way,” Spencer tells her, “so there’s no problem, right? I’ll manage the company. But look at her. She’s making it, and she's happy.”

Valerie frowns, crosses her arms. He’s seen the look of disapproval on her face more times than he can count. “You’ve got some nerve to say that,” she says, and he wonders when that’s changed. He’s seen the look of disapproval on her face more times than he can count and so he knows, now, that that isn’t what this is. Valerie has never been one for sympathy, but he thinks that maybe, just maybe, this is the closest they will get to a compromise.


End file.
